New Media (R)evolution – Editorial Planning
Published September 23, 2011 | 
While technology tools including keyword clouds and text analytics just might give you some good ideas for the content you plan to provide, when it comes right down to actually creating it, the real answer to the content question is right in front of you or in other words, right between your ears. So get your pencils ready, warm up the keyboard, prepare the video camera and then ask the all important question, “What have we’ve learned that can be turned in valuable useful content?” Then start the process of content development and creation.
Understand clearly before you start that you can’t expect to simply pay for the opportunity and honor of presenting in front of a group of people anymore, and you actually need to do something your audiences consider of great value. The days are long over when a one-way, one-time flash of the latest news from your company commands the same consideration or the same results as it once did. In the present day it’s all about content, content and more content that’s entertaining, informative, engages, and considered highly-valuable by your target market niche.
Consumers in the market are becoming much more exacting about the content they want and utilize, and with the expanding plethora of media channels available in today’s market, they can be. Just look back on the last time you searched for a topic of interest, news or information. Your search like most resulted in a rather long option list, beginning with blog posts, then ads and various corporate websites and related news releases, articles, videos and much more. 
Of course, this gave you great opportunities to choose the best channel that appeared the most informative and enlightening for what you’re looking for. Based on your personal experience, understand that people in your target market niche are doing the very same thing so be 100% certain with high-confidence that you’re have created or located content that when they see it, they will find it remarkable.
In order to do this correctly, and to consistently maintain your ability to offer compelling content on an extended regular basis you need to train yourself to think like an editor or publisher (if you don’t already), create effective content strategies and follow up tactics with the assets you have that support it. The most common question is where to start? The simple answer is with an editorial plan.
New Media (R)evolution – Assigning Responsibilities
Published September 19, 2011 | Assign Daily Responsibilities
An important question that needs to be addressed directly without making any assumptions that interferes with the established processes is, “Who is at the end of the day assigned to be in charge of operational communication plans and initiatives in social or new media?” Understand that while you may be the very one responsible for every part of outbound communication, real market niche interaction and engagement is an everyday process, and a responsibility that requires a lot of time, commitment, steadfast dedication and support. Also, understand that it isn’t just a job for the intern.
Other questions include, “Will any content be created and developed in-house or is it to be outsourced? What about responds to posts, if any? Once again, who makes final decisions or where does the buck stop? Who has responsibility or shared accountability for perform results? Who will supply the encouragement and be the cheerleader within the organization or business, in particular after the novelty wears of?
Now let me tell you every experienced social media strategist can tell a story about aggressive clients who were ready for action, and resolved to kick off a target market engagement strategy, only without the strategy. 
Of course, they’re certain they need to be on Facebook and Twitter, even with strong research indicating that their important customers and influencers weren’t there, and would in all likelihood never be there. So instead of connecting with their market niche where the consumers were actually gathering together, the businesses flung their efforts headlong into social media and other attempts at targeted market niche engagement.
Quite predictably, they were time and again extremely unhappy with the results of their efforts. So again, let’s contrast this with traditional marketing and PR. If your customer-base is reading The Wall Street Journal, is your strategy going to be to reach them at Seventeen? 
In any case, each of these titles is immensely popular—with its own market niche readers. Poor targeting is poor targeting no matter the vehicle selected, and almost absurdly ridiculous when measured in those terms.
While it’s quite easy to get caught up in the excitement, you should push ahead in an endeavor to connect with your targeted market niches, but proceeding without completing the necessary strategic and tactical exploratory steps can leave you feeling much like you’re in the middle of nowhere, and no critical roadmap in sight. It’s an understatement to say the excitement of the journey wears off very fast, many times leaving you exhausted, lost and overwhelmed. Instead, we hope to provide the direction you need to take steps and execute well thought-out and planned processes with assured confidence.
New Media (R)evolution – Strategies, Tactics and Channels
Published September 15, 2011 | Align Your Strategy and Tactics with the Channels that Resonate with Targeted Market Niches
It seems that all the lists of mistakes to avoid when organizations first venture into social media have some mistakes more common than others that everyone tends to agree with. The mistake most common is “trying to do too much at once.”
Understand that instead of attempting to cover the entire world with your important messages, it’s really best to select a smaller number of platforms or applications that you can manage and handle skillfully. It doesn’t matter whether you use premium monitoring tools or you engage free online tools, it should most likely become apparent where your influencers and market niche members are meeting and gathering online.
You should plan to start by establishing an online presence in the application platforms that make the most sense or is significant for each of your market niches. Questions to answer include, “Should you establish a Facebook page or YouTube channel? Should you engage on blogs and forums specific to what you do or create a Twitter feed?” At the same time, don’t forget to maintain traditional channels.
Also, many of your reliably faithful market niche members remain so, even if you aren’t receiving concurrent data to promptly inform you. You should strongly consider and decide the best timing that is the most logical-sense to target a 
segment of writers, journalists or online bloggers and leverage their influence with the targeted market segment by presenting and pitching them directly.
In addition, once you’re successful at placement of your content in front of people and subsequently building a community, it is highly-important that you then make sure you aggregate the content comprehensively on your own site. (Another very-common mistake to avoid completely) This will allow you a level of control over the information and content flow, as well as provide an easy place for your valuable customers and stakeholders to keep up with what you’re doing, not to mention the extra-added value associated with increased search traffic.
New Media (R)evolution – Know Your Target Market Niche
Published September 9, 2011 | 
In-depth Analysis of Your Target Market Segments
It is more important now than ever to clearly understand that communication is all about building and strengthening relationships. Up until the past couple years, businesses haven’t always had the opportunity or tools to directly and effectively accomplish that.
Of course, now social media provides an important and welcomed opportunity to address crucial relationship building. While at the same time, we need to quickly increase our awareness of the changing social media landscape and the explosion of channels and information providers, giving target market niches innumerable more alternatives and choices than any time in the past.
As discussed previously, it’s easy to understand that you can’t answer the questions you don’t hear, and current trends indicate there is very little interconnect in terms of how traditional, online and social network consumers search, learn and more importantly share information. In addition, with content being instantaneously replaced, reposted and shared the barriers to switching sources almost non-existent, exclusivity and uniqueness is in reality no longer part of the picture.
If you want to sway close attention and be given a share of someone’s valuable time, you have to go to your target market niche rather than waiting for them to come to you. So you need to spend time not only understanding the consumer you are trying to reach, but how to best engage with them on their turf and terms. What all that means is the need to segment your market niche by demographics, and by behavioral, social and psychological variables that reveal their consumption, sharing and engagement trends habits.
Finally, understand also that in social media, you do not need to exclude anyone. Furthermore, your social media efforts can be found just as easily as any major international brands, which levels the playing field for brands to a great extent
So always be consistent and contribute valuable information, become engaged in conversations and respect the evolving etiquette in the social media space.
Over time, if properly executed, your target market niche followers and readers will develop an interest and appreciation for what you’ve said and engage with you should they feel the need for your goods or services. Though a little longer to sometimes realize and more difficult to measure, it is still a valuable return on investment on using social media targeting a certain group without the exclusion of others in peripheral target market niches.
Premium Social Media Monitoring Tools
Published September 7, 2011 | 
If you are like most that work with online marketing or social media, you know how difficult a task it can be to try and be all over the place at once. Social media monitoring tools can be tremendously effective and informative to help brands, companies of all sizes and individuals keep up with all significantly relevant social media action and activities.
Social Media Monitoring Tools is not only helpful for checking what people actually say about you, your company or brand, but they additionally help you examine the “return on investment,” and the actions you need to take to improve your reputation and make and keep your customers happy.
The following large compiled list of premium social media monitoring tools to help you reach your social media goals are not free, but they may offer limited free use and charge a premium (freemium) to use the complete available service, and many of them offer free demos.
| Alterian | Alterian’s social media engagement solutions make it easy to listen to the conversations taking place about your company and brand on the Internet. |
| Analytic.ly | Analyticly is a data mining, DIY analytics, and brand engagement service provider for enterprise brand managers, advertising agencies, social media strategists, and hedge fund managers. |
| ASOMO | ASOMO helps interpret and understand spontaneous opinion. Discover which topics and sub-topics are being discussed, the volume of comments, themes, and the relationships between them. |
| Attentio | Right now, millions of people all around the world are discussing a multitude of topics, including brands and products that matter in their lives. By continuously monitoring what is written in blogs, discussion forums and other social media, Attentio provides organizations with the ability to listen, analyze and react to what is happening in the “webosphere”. |
| Awareness Networks | The Awareness Social Marketing Hub provides marketers with the information they need to measure success and direct future marketing investment. Track the effectiveness and reach of published content across social media channels with one simple view of activity across your social marketing campaigns and drill down to see the details of how a particular piece of content is being consumed, shared, commented on, and favorited. |
| Bantam Live | Bantam Live is an online service for business teams to collaborate in a workspace and build relationships across the Web. With integrated applications for microblogging, CRM, and project management, Bantam Live is centered around a real-time stream, where people, applications, and data come together. |
| Beevolve | Track consumer-generated media, understand sentiment, identify emerging trends and use the resulting insights to improve products, marketing, sales and service. |
| Brandchats | Brandchats picks up the chat about your brand. You tell it what to look for and it will find it, whether it’s in Facebook, Twitter, a blog, or any other source. Slicing and dicing your data, Brandchats will instantaneously visualize the results. Powerful unique analysis and graphics capabilities support you to make sense of the “chattering”. Is it good news or bad news? Does it come from blogs or Facebook? Is it increasing or rather decreasing? |
| BrandsEye | BrandsEye protects your brand from attacks, allows you to tap into key insights which are integral to making the right decisions and harnessing positive word-of-mouth. |
| Buzz Manager | Buzz Manager constantly searches the Internet for information about your organization or specific individual subjects. It measures and analyzes the “Buzz,” and then accurately presents the results in time saving, easy-to-use reports. |
| Buzzcapture | Buzzcapture monitors places where opinions are exchanged to provide insight into how often companies and their brands, products, and competitors are discussed, what the sentiments are, and where discussions are taking place. |
| BuzzGain | BuzzGain is an online service for discovering and engaging with the people who will help your business thrive in today’s social economy — where attention is a precious commodity. |
| Buzzient | Buzzient provides a next-generation solution for social media analytics and integration of this valuable content with enterprise applications. |
| BuzzPerception | BuzzPerception provides comprehensive blog monitoring and analysis to help clients better understand and manage their brand perception online. |
| BuzzStream | How do you build credibility online? You do it by cultivating quality relationships with influencers across the Web. Until now that process was time-consuming and resource-intensive. BuzzStream simplifies this process, allowing you to efficiently cultivate and manage these relationships. |
| Chartbeat | Chartbeat is a revolutionary real-time analytics service that enables people to understand emergent behaviour in real-time and exploit or mitigate it. |
| Cogito Monitor | What is being said online about my company? Why do people like my competitor’s product better? How is our new marketing campaign going? My reputation has been damaged: why? These are a few of the questions that Cogito Monitor can answer. |
| Collective Intellect | Collective Intellect’s Social CRM Insight platform automates your ability to identify emerging consumer considerations and preferences, and to track your ability to change them. |
| ContextVoice | Tracking millions of daily micro-conversations from the real-time social Web, ContextVoice helps you get business intelligence and real-time insights and analytics about consumers. |
| Conversation | eCairn Conversation is a SaaS application that provides a cost-effective solution for marketing professionals who want to leverage communities and influencers. |
| CoTweet | CoTweet is a comprehensive Web-based social media engagement, management, and reporting solution that helps companies of all sizes engage, track, and analyze conversations about their brands across the most popular and influential social communities today: Twitter and Facebook. |
| Crimson Hexagon | By leveraging the Crimson Hexagon ForSight platform, customers can easily uncover consumer opinions and insights about their company, products, industry, competitors and more. They can then use that information to make meaningful business decisions. |
| Dialogix | Dialogix is a social media monitoring tool that shows you exactly what is being said about your brand, industry, and competitors on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, news Web sites, forums, MySpace, and more. |
| Direct Message Lab | Direct Message Lab provides one central platform for companies to effectively build, manage, and analyze their social presence everywhere across social media, social networks like Facebook and Twitter, plus other popular user channels including mobile applications, widgets, desktop applications, and video sharing sites. |
| dna MediaVantage | dna13′s MediaVantage solution provides real-time access to TV, print, online and social media content, providing communicators the insight they need to plan marketing strategies, securely align corporate teams, synchronize the delivery of corporate messages, and engage with key stakeholders. |
| eWatch | eWatch is the fast, easy, and cost-effective way to track what the media, investors, consumers, and the competition are saying about your organization. It scans hundreds of thousands of traditional print and Web-based articles and postings each day and delivers its findings back to you in an easy to read report. |
| Gnip | Gnip is a social media API aggregation tool that streams social data from Twitter, Facebook, and dozens more sources — all in one API. |
| GraphEdge | GraphEdge measures changes in your network. Your first report is sent in 2-3 days. |
| ImpactWatch | ImpactWatch is an easy-to-use online dashboard that gives you the power to monitor and measure all of your media coverage in real time. |
| JitterJam | JitterJam helps your consumer-facing brand or business capture relevant conversations on the real-time Web and turn them into lasting and trusted customer relationships. |
| Klout | Klout tracks the impact of your opinions, links and recommendations across your social graph. It collects data about the content you create, how people interact with that content, and the size and composition of your network. It analyzes the data to find indicators of influence and provides you with tools to interact with and interpret the data. |
| Looxii | Looxii is a social media analytics platform. It enables you to search for keywords on Twitter, Facebook, blogs, YouTube, Flickr, and more. It stores the search results and you receive easy to interpret, top-level insights into what’s being said about your keywords throughout social media. |
| Maestro | The Cymfony Maestro platform gives you real-time access to a comprehensive, custom-built archive of traditional and social media, filtered and classified to be relevant to your company, brand and business goals. |
| MambaIQ | MambaIQ tells you where people are talking about you, compared to your competitors, and segmented by all the relevant concepts (themes, type of media, sentiment, characteristics, reputation of the sites, and even universes (groups of sites) defined by you. |
| Market Sentinel | Market Sentinel has the technology to monitor, analyse and measure online commentary to inform your marketing strategy and help you make better business decisions. It trawls the Internet to find discussions on blogs, forums, in chat rooms, and on mainstream media which mention your brand, and then accurately calculates the sentiment, which provides you with a profile of your brand as it is perceived online. |
| Marketo B2B Social Marketing | By integrating with social media solutions, Marketo can help companies extend their marketing initiatives to include B2B social media and incorporate the conversations that happen on social sites. As a result, customer conversations that influence word-of-mouth opinion are responded to in real-time and relationships are developed across a variety of channels. |
| Meltwater Buzz | Meltwater Buzz is an innovative social media monitoring tool that enables comprehensive tracking and analysis of user-generated content on the Web. It enables users to monitor more than 200 million blogs, micro-blogs, social networks, forums, video and photo Web sites, product reviews, and other social media sites to gain a better understanding about end-user sentiment on hot topics, new products, companies, and the competition. |
| Monitor | Monitor is a social media monitoring platform with support for 150 million blogs and thousands of news sources including Twitter, Youtube, Digg, Flickr, and Technorati. It is the only media tracking tool for monitoring brands and topics, that connects social media activities with financial metrics. |
| Newsdesk | Newsdesk is an easy-to-use business intelligence SaaS application for intuitive mining, finding, and sharing of real-time relevant information from a vast collection of world-wide daily news, social media, and industry publications. |
| PositivePress | Now, more than ever, it’s essential to track what people are saying about your brand online. PositivePress makes it easy for you to track and measure online coverage. It creates a complete historical archive so you can make better decisions over the long run. |
| PostRank | PostRank is the largest aggregator of social engagement data in the industry. Its platform tracks where and how users engage, and what they pay attention to — in real time. PostRank social engagement data measures actual user activity, the most accurate indicator of the relevance and influence of a site, story, or author. PostRank offers both free and plans. |
| Radian6 | The Radian6 dashboard is a complete social media monitoring, engagement, and workflow management platform created to help you aggregate and analyze the comments people are making about your brand and products on the Web. View trends and dig deeper into specific posts to get a pulse on how your company is faring online. |
| Raven | Raven is an online software system that helps customers quickly research, manage, monitor, and report on SEO, email, social media and other Internet marketing campaigns. |
| RepuTrace | RepuTrace enables you to keep up on developments that affect your company and your industry. It monitors, analyzes, and measures intelligence from Web sites, blogs, chat rooms, social networks, and other media sources. |
| RESONATE | RESONATE’s social media monitoring technology helps your business keep up with social media conversations. It analyzes content from over 200 million online sources in real time, enabling you to better understand and respond to customers, threats, and opportunities as they happen. |
| Revinate | The first enterprise-grade social media solution for hotels, Revinate brings order to the chaos of guest reviews, online reputation, and social media marketing. Hotels can now harness online reviews and social media as the ultimate measures of guest satisfaction and drivers of demand. |
| RightNow Social Experience | RightNow Social Experience allows you to monitor conversations on Twitter, YouTube, RSS feeds, your Facebook fan page, and other social channels, and then helps you respond quickly and appropriately. |
| SAS Social Media Analytics | SAS Social Media Analytics integrates, analyzes, and enables organizations to act on intelligence gleaned from online conversations occurring across professional and consumer-generated media sites. It enables organizations to attribute online conversations to specific parts of their business, allowing an accelerated response to shifts in the marketplace. |
| Scanbuzz | Scanbuzz™ is the leading service for life science companies to track mentions of their brands across social media. With increasing numbers of physicians and patients sharing their experiences online, Scanbuzz™ allows you to discover, listen, manage feedback and develop relations with social network users. |
| ScoutLabs | Scout Labs provides cutting-edge technology and a collaborative platform for listening to customers and engaging with them across the Internet. The Web-based application tracks social media and finds signals in the noise to help your team build better products and stronger customer relationships. |
| Silverbakk Briefing Room | Silverbakk Briefing Room monitors and analyzes social media based on relevance, activity, and engagement. |
| SM2 | Alterian SM2 is a business intelligence product that provides visibility into social media and lets you tap into a new kind of data resource; your customers’ direct thoughts and opinions. It allows you to easily capture and analyze data from social media channels to monitor your brands, identify key communities and influencers, address customer service issues, and generate new sales leads. |
| Social Radar | Social Radar allows you to track, measure, analyze, and understand chatter from all over the Web in an easy-to-use Web-based control panel. |
| SocialToo | SocialToo helps automate the management of your Twitter and Facebook accounts and unclutters your stream and social graph so you can focus on building relationships. |
| Socialscape | There have never been so many ways for so many people to say so much about your company, your products, and your competition. Socialscape tracks and analyzes all of that talk and turns it into actionable information that can improve your brand, your business, and your customer relationships. |
| SocialSense | SocialSense leverages social media conversation to fuel insights that drive smart marketing decisions. |
| SocialTALK | SocialTALK helps you better manage and measure your social media presence and impact. It is an is an innovative tool that allows brands to more effectively create, publish, and measure their content strategy and posting schedule. |
| Spredfast | Spredfast is an enterprise-class solution that empowers your company or organization to communicate across all of your social media channels, measure the effectiveness of each conversation, and prove the value of social media. |
| StartPR | StartPR helps you find, manage, and respond to mentions of your company, your brand, your products, your service, and your people online. |
| StepRep Reputation Intelligence | StepRep Reputation Intelligence pokes an ear into every corner of the Web to find out what your customers are saying about your brand right now. These results are analyzed to reveal trends and stats that you can use to improve your marketing and customer service. |
| SWIX Social Marketer | SWIX offers social media analytics applications that monitor all of your social media properties (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, +20 others). Each day, SWIX gathers visitor and usage data for your sites, graphs it all over time and puts everything in one convenient place for you. |
| Tealium Social Media | Tealium Social Media lets social media marketers and PR professionals measure the true ROI of their activities. You can measure the impact of your social media and online PR using tangible numbers that make sense to your organization. |
| The Search Monitor | The Search Monitor closely watches your paid and organic search keywords and trademarks on search engines, Web sites, news sites, and blogs. It logs competitor activity, affiliate activity, trademark use, and who’s talking about you. |
| ThoughtBuzz | ThoughtBuzz is a real-time platform for tracking, managing, and engaging in conversations online, helping companies make informed decisions to protect their brand. |
| TraceBuzz | TraceBuzz shows you what people say on the Web right now about your name, brand, product, company or competitor. |
| Trackur | Trackur is an online reputation and social media monitoring tool designed to assist you in tracking what is said about you on the Internet. It scans hundreds of millions of Web pages — including news, blogs, video, images, and forums — and lets you know if it discovers anything that matches the keywords that interest you. |
| Trendrr | Trendrr is a business intelligence Web service for digital and social media. It allows you to listen, measure, and respond to the conversation about a product, service, or brand in real time. |
| TweetBeep | TweetBeep helps you keep track of conversations that mention you, your products, your company, anything, with hourly updates. You can also track who’s tweeting your Web site or blog, even if they use a shortened URL (like bit.ly or tinyurl.com). It offers both free and plans. |
| Twitalyzer | Twitalyzer is the social media industry’s most popular, most widely used analytics application. It offers both free an options. |
| uberVU | uberVU is the complete social media platform that helps your team collaborate on listening, reporting and engaging in social media. Perfect for agencies or teams inside businesses that want to deliver social media excellence. |
| Viralheat | Viralheat is a social measurement platform designed with simplicity and ease of use in mind. Built from the ground up to be timely and efficient, Viralheat allows users to easily comprehend social media. |
| Vocus | Vocus social media software enables you to listen to customers and prospects, find influencers, and monitor conversations, mentions and trends. |
| WaveMetrix | WaveMetrix tracks online buzz for major global brands around the world, using a unique methodology based on human analysts reading each post. |
| WebDig | WebDig is a next-generation business intelligence and analysis engine that finds, aggregates, and interprets digital word-of-mouth (WOM) content. Every study is reviewed, analyzed, and reported on by assigned industry expert analysts. |
| Webtrends | Webtrends Social Measurement offers a self-service platform for identifying and participating in conversations related to your products and brands wherever and whenever they occur on the social Web. |
| White Noise | White Noise is a DIY tool that lets you monitor the Web and understand what is going on without the need for hiring outside companies to do the work for you. |
| Woopra | Woopra is a desktop Web analytics tool designed as a client + server application. It creates a one-stop service for monitoring all your blogs and Web sites. |